


Something Not Quite Missing

by PockySquirrel



Category: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Genre: Background Relationships, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4672154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PockySquirrel/pseuds/PockySquirrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since his departure for Aquitar, Billy has been dreadful about keeping in touch with anyone on Earth. His friends have decided they're not going to stand for it any longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Not Quite Missing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tsukino_Akume](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tsukino_Akume/gifts).



> Set circa early Turbo. Timelines are fuzzy, as usual.

It had taken a few months, but Billy’s workspace in the Aquitian Science Consortium's laboratory complex was finally starting to feel like home. It wasn’t much like the workshop he had started building in his early teens, that had slowly taken over his father's disused garage. The technology was incomparably more sophisticated. It was far quieter than the garage, where something had always been humming, or buzzing, or bubbling, in addition to the ambient noise of the neighborhood outside. And it definitely lacked the smell, that pungent combination of old furniture, motor oil, and ozone. Everything on Aquitar tended to smell either like salt water or a freshly mowed lawn after a protracted rainfall. The lab complex was no exception, though it never failed to remind Billy of a hospital in that it both smelled and felt markedly cleaner than anyplace else. But the one thing from his workshop on Earth that he had managed to replicate to his satisfaction here was the clutter. He never had fewer than four projects in progress at any one time, and although his desk was littered with bits and pieces of all of them - not to mention his tools, his personal effects, and several datapads worth of documentation and research material - he always knew precisely where everything was.

Having his desk in his preferred balance of order and chaos made Billy feel more settled than he had in quite some time. Since before he gave up his powers, if he was being honest with himself. His earliest days as a permanent resident of Aquitar were an absolute blur to even his eidetic memory: the treatments for his premature aging, the acculturation, lab orientation with Cestro, dates with Cestria. But somewhere along the line, things had calmed down. It was a good feeling, really.

In the midst of dictating the results of that morning's set of experiments into the computer - while also tinkering with the faulty command module of the half-disassembled robot in the corner - a polite 'blip' and the appearance of a small, flashing icon in the corner of his terminal screen alerted him that he had a message. 

An interstellar message.

Billy paused in both dictation and tinkering - any communication to him from another planet had to have been important - and tapped the icon to bring up the message. 

His eyes quickly flickered over the information set in front of him. Format: text only. Source: Earth. Contents...an email. From Rocky.

He hesitated before reading. 

_Hey Billy,_

_My parents got me a new computer to take to college next year, and Alpha helped me reconfigure the insides so it could send emails to space. Pretty cool, huh? He's even working on a portable version that'll work with any computer, so the others can write to you, too. It'd probably be done already if you were still here, but we'll make it happen._

_No one's heard from you in awhile, so we just wanted to write and see if everything was going okay for you out there. Write back when you get a chance. Tell Cestria we said hi._

_Rocky_

Whatever Billy might have vaguely expected the message to be, it certainly wasn't that. He read it through twice, prepared to start typing a reply, and then stopped again, unsure of what to say. Earth felt simultaneously like a lifetime ago and yesterday, and anything he could think of to put in a message back to Rocky seemed either trivial or overwhelming.Ultimately, he decided to save the message and shunt it off to a corner of the screen, to be attended to once he had gotten some time to think about his response. 

The messages that followed met with the same fate.

***

Billy was working out a fairly major malfunction in the pod-city's local communications array, up to his elbows in the cabling of the excised part, when there was a commotion outside the lab. Laughter, and voices that were familiar but certainly didn’t belong here. He paused in his work and listened. 

“...took a while, but we’ve managed to adjust the atmospheric settings in his quarters to levels that your species finds more comfortable. We can apply the same parameters to the guest quarters during your stay.” 

That was unmistakably Cestria, and just as unmistakably talking about him. 

“Good, because this humidity is wreaking havoc on my hair.”

Billy froze. He knew only one person who could possibly manage to be concerned with the state of her hairstyle while visiting another planet. But that was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

He started toward the door, but it opened before he got there. 

“Surprise!”

There, standing with a rather smug-looking Cestria, were Jason, Kimberly, Trini, and Zack. Within seconds, he found himself surrounding in something that bore almost as much resemblance to a football tackle as it did to a hug.   
Several different questions popped into his mind at once, but all that managed to make its way to his mouth was "What...?"

"Wow, Billy, I don't think I've ever seen you speechless before," Kimberly teased.

"Only when he was trying to talk to girls in 8th grade," Zack added, and Trini promptly whapped him on the arm. 

"Be nice," she scolded. 

By now, Billy had managed to regain just enough composure to gaze helplessly out at Cestria from the middle of the pile-on/hug and ask, "Did you set this up?"

She shook her head. "Only the arrangements on this end. It was their idea."

“Jason and I were in Angel Grove recently,” Kimberly explained. “We got to talking with the others, one thing led to another, we made some phone calls, they made some communicator calls, and as it turns out, vacationing to another planet doesn’t count as using the Power for personal gain because Rangers are meant to look after one another, even in retirement.”

“Everyone wanted to come, but between saving the world and trying to graduate, we were the only ones who could make it this time,” Trini added. 

“This time?” Billy parroted, still largely bewildered by this turn of events. “And why did anyone feel like I needed looking after?”

Jason gave him an empathetic pat on the shoulder and advised, “Maybe answer your emails once in awhile, bro.”

Abashed, Billy mumbled in reply, “Duly noted.”

***

Billy quickly found out that his friends on Aquitar had also been in on the conspiracy, and that Delphine - in her official capacity as leader of the Rangers, of course - had taken the liberty of organizing a formal reception for the visitors. Rangers of other worlds were always to be treated as honored guests. Kimberly bemoaned having neglected to pack a dress, and then insisted on going shopping. She looked radiant in her final selection, but the look on her face when Billy told her that the fabric’s luster came from the presence of bioluminescent microorganisms in the seaweed fibers it was processed from was priceless. 

Zack, meanwhile, had discovered that the Aquitian definition of dancing was quite different from his own, and immediately decided to kick-start the process of cultural diffusion. After first making a valiant if awkward effort to learn from his hosts, Zack had requested temporary control of the stereo. For Billy, that meant a thorough vetting of Zack’s musical suggestions, vetoing several on the grounds that some of the louder and higher-pitched frequencies could cause the Aquitians actual physical pain. Then he had to jury-rig an Aquitian amplification system to Zack’s Discman. 

He didn’t mind any of that. He never did.

***

They ended up staying for two weeks, Earth time. Billy hadn’t been planning on a vacation and begged off to go to the lab the day after their arrival, only to find that Cestro had wiped his schedule and was monitoring anything that needed regular attention. Any fit of pique he might have had over that was quickly swept away in witnessing the wonder of his oldest friends at experiencing his new home. He remembered that wonder. Coming to Aquitar for the first time had been a thrill, the realization of a dream. And he led his friends along the same paths his own steps had taken then. He could still scarcely believe that they were actually here, but the shock had given way to childlike excitement, the desire to show them absolutely everything he could in the time that he had. 

Trini asked for a tour of the lab, and he was more than happy to oblige. The others had gone off on a joint training exercise with the Aquitian Rangers; Tideus was all but demanding that Zack start teaching him Hip-Hop Kido, and Jason was keen on sparring with Aurico. That left just the two of them, Billy showing Trini around and explaining each thing he had been working on in turn, never having to pause or clarify, always trusting that she’d understand. She always had, long before the Power had brought them even closer together.

It was there, and then, that everything caught up with him at once.

The tears were in his eyes before he could stop them. 

Trini was at his side immediately, arm around his waist. 

“What is it?” she asked. 

“All of this...you guys coming here…” he gestured helplessly, trying to find the right words. “It’s a lot. It’s a lot more than I ever would have expected.”

“Billy,” Trini said evenly. “Did you honestly think we wouldn’t?”

He took a shuddering breath and told her the truth. “When I left...I guess I had myself convinced that no one would care if I did.”

Trini just nodded and pulled him in closer.   
“Jason told me some of what happened after we left. It couldn’t have been easy, especially at the end. But...do you think that coming here was the answer?”

“I do,” he told her, honestly. “You know me better than anyone...this is everything I’ve ever dreamed of, ever since I was a kid. I love my work, being with Cestria is amazing...the life I have here is phenomenal.”

“But?”

“But there are still some times that I miss Earth and everyone else so much that it hurts.”

“Like right now?”

“Like right now.”

“So come back,” Trini urged. “Not forever, but for long enough. The teleporter works both ways, you know.”

“As does email, as Jason has been so fond of reminding me,” Billy said wryly.

“Go easy on him. Rocky was so excited about the email thing, and so crushed when you didn’t answer, and Jason’s the one who had to deal with him.”

Ah, yes, the patented Trini guilt trip. It never failed.

“I should go see him.”

“Yes, you should.”

“I missed you. I missed _this_.”

“If I told you now that I missed you too, would you believe me?”

“Now? Yes...I would.”

***

In the desert outside Angel Grove, two figures stood waiting, eyes turned skyward. Billy saw them as he maneuvered the spacecraft in to land at the designated coordinates. The taller one, Rocky, leaning against the car, arms folded. And the shorter figure, the one apparently unable to keep still in his excitement, that must have been Justin, successor to them both. In their recent correspondence, Rocky had gone into great detail about how excited Justin was to meet him. Billy was the stuff of legend to his young mind. Billy who was a genius, like him, who got picked on by other kids, like him, who had been a Blue Ranger, just like him. Billy, who was now living on another planet, dating an alien, and coming to visit in an _actual spaceship_. He had blown the poor kid’s mind before even meeting him. 

He landed, powered the engines down, and opened the ship’s hatch. His pupils contracted sharply, stung by the brightness of a sun he had become unaccustomed to. His lungs momentarily seized on the dry air and he coughed. He took his first steps outside, onto the soil of his homeworld, and looked around as if seeing this once familiar place with fresh eyes. 

Two such different places, literally light years apart, and yet both were home to him now. As Justin bolted toward the spaceship, Rocky just a pace or two behind and smiling broadly, Billy’s lips twitched into a smile. 

He could get used to this.


End file.
